Frisoni Matteo, Tosoni Annalisa, Bufagna Alessia, Sestieri Carlo
Department of Psychology, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, Campus di Cesena, via Rasi e Spinelli, Cesena, Italy.
Department of Psychology (DiPSI) & ITAB, Institute for Advanced Biomedical Technologies, G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy.
Psychol Rep. 2024 Sep 19:332941241282650. doi: 10.1177/00332941241282650.
Meaning-making and temporal memory are closely intertwined, yet we still do not know how the overall understanding of complex events affects retrospective temporal judgments. The present study investigated the effect of a manipulation of the temporal linearity of a narrative on the subsequent memory-for-time performance. Participants indicated the time of occurrence of short video clips extracted from a previously encoded movie on a horizontal timeline representing the movie duration. Importantly, a group of participants ( = 20) watched the original movie, which depicts events occurring in chronological order, whereas another group ( = 30) watched a scrambled version of the same movie in which the temporal linearity was lost. This procedure allowed us to measure the quantity and direction of the temporal memory bias. The scrambled presentation produced a mild and general impairment of recognition memory compared to the linear presentation. More importantly, it biased temporal judgments as a function of the direction and amount of discrepancy between the story and the viewing time, in accordance with an automatic reshaping of temporal memory caused by a chronological representation of the storyline. This effect could be distinguished from a tendency to move judgments toward the center of the timeline, independently from the specific scrambling arrangement, consistent with the idea that the non-linearity of the story also generally increased the degree of temporal uncertainty. Taken together, our results provide further evidence that temporal memories are automatically reconstructed according to the general meaning of the events.
意义构建与时间记忆紧密相连，但我们仍不清楚对复杂事件的整体理解如何影响回顾性时间判断。本研究调查了叙事的时间线性操作对后续时间记忆表现的影响。参与者在代表电影时长的水平时间线上指出从先前编码的电影中提取的短视频片段的发生时间。重要的是，一组参与者（n = 20）观看了按照时间顺序描绘事件的原始电影，而另一组（n = 30）观看了同一部电影的打乱版本，其中时间线性丧失。这一程序使我们能够测量时间记忆偏差的数量和方向。与线性呈现相比，打乱呈现导致识别记忆出现轻微且普遍的受损。更重要的是，根据故事与观看时间之间差异的方向和程度，它使时间判断产生偏差，这与故事情节的时间顺序呈现导致时间记忆的自动重塑一致。这种效应可以与一种将判断移向时间线中心的倾向区分开来，该倾向与特定的打乱安排无关，这与故事的非线性也通常增加时间不确定性程度的观点一致。综上所述，我们的结果提供了进一步的证据，表明时间记忆会根据事件的一般意义自动重构。
